Icon of Evil

Icon of Evil: Hitler's Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam is a 2008 book by David G. Dalin and John F. Rothmann initially published by Random House; the 2009 version of the book by Transaction Publishers has an introduction by Alan Dershowitz. It is a biography of Haj Amin al-Husseini (1895–1974), who was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate period. Some reviewers were critical of its "overtly propagandistic" style, citing numerous factual errors and criticizing its thesis that a direct line can be drawn from the Mufti to modern-day Islamic leaders as unconvincing and lacking evidence. Other reviewers praised the book, one describing it as "the first serious biography of the mufti to appear in 14 years".

Summary

The book portrays Husseini, a member of an important Jerusalem Arab family, as an antisemite and a key figure in infusing the modern Arab world with antisemitic attitudes. It asserts that Husseini's views were the casus belli for virtually all modern Middle Eastern terrorism – "an unbroken chain of terror from Adolf Hitler, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Sayyid Qutb, and Yasser Arafat to Hamas' founder and spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, Sheikh Omar Abd al-Rahman, and Ramzi Yousef, who planned the World Trade Center bombings of 1993, to Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the Pakistani Muslim terrorist who planned the kidnapping and murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, and to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

Reviews

Icon of Evil received a strongly critical response from some reviewers. Simon Maxwell Apter, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, describes the book as "cursory and apparently hastily written" and "bereft of any nuance or counterargument" for its insistence on blaming the mufti for "anything and everything Islamist". Acknowledging that Husseini had indeed played an important role in inciting anti-Jewish violence, Apter concludes that Icon of Evil presents a distorted simplification of history: "To claim that Icon of Evil paints a black-and-white view of history does the book too much justice; it's an entirely black—or entirely white—story told here."

The Israeli historian Tom Segev, writing in the New York Times, criticized the book as "of little scholarly value, and [it] may be potentially harmful to Middle East peace prospects." Segev highlights the authors' consistent failure to provide solid evidence, for instance asserting on the basis of rumors that Husseini owed his position to a "passionate homosexual relationship" with a senior British official, and the degree to which the authors "blur the terms radical Islam, anti-Semitism and Nazism" and group together numerous Arabs and Muslims as "disciples of the mufti." He concludes: "[T]he book is worth noticing, as it belongs to a genre of popular Arab-bashing that is often believed to be 'good for Israel.' It is not. The suggestion that Israel's enemies are Nazis, or the Nazis' heirs, is apt to discourage any fair compromise with the Palestinians, and that is bad for Israel."

Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, commends the authors for "putting their finger on important affinities" but criticises the quality of their work, describing Icon of Evil as a "bad book": "they decidedly over-reach, and, given the poverty of their scholarship, they often fail to persuade, leaving the reader with the bad taste of propaganda." He comments that they "suffer not from pedantry but from overtly propagandistic aims. They are constantly beating an ideological drum.